Missing May

by Cynthia Rylant

  May’s funeral turned Ob and me into temporary sort-of socialites, and we never really got the chance to howl and pull our hair out. People wanted us to grieve proper.

  So standing there in that bleak and empty garden listening to Ob make May alive again, that seemed to fix something in me that had needed fixing ever since the funeral. And in the oddest way Cletus became what we’d needed all along from the undertaker and preacher and visiting relatives. He became the perfect consoler, because he listened to every word Ob said and kept his fat mouth shut. Cletus had some gifts — I was learning this bit by bit — and knowing when to talk and when not to was turning out to be one of them.

  Ob finally drained his cup of praises to May and grew still. His eyes looked with Cletus’s to the sky, and I couldn’t keep mine from following. Nothing but a black crow passed overhead. And no sound but Ob’s heavy breathing and an occasional snort from Cletus, whose nose had started to run.

  Neither Cletus nor I was willing to make a move until Ob did. We watched him turn his head this way and that, like adjusting the dial on a radio. Then finally he gave a great sigh, and we knew May had not come to him. He shook his head wearily and walked away from us toward the empty trailer.

  We watched him go over the hill and through the front door. Then we looked at each other and we, too, let out our own sighs of disappointment.

  “He’s going to make himself sick or crazy, one,” I said to Cletus, suddenly feeling a big lump in my throat, a wetness in my eyes.

  Cletus shrugged his shoulders and gave me one of his strange smiles.

  “Least it gives him something to do,” he said. “Gets him out of bed in the mornings.”

  I shook my head and remained silent. I didn’t want Cletus to know the pain this caused me, that I wasn’t enough to bring Ob to life each day. That it wasn’t enough he had me left to still love.

  Cletus looked at me.

  “You don’t really believe he feels her, do you?” he said, almost like he was accusing me of something.

  I gave him a sharp look.

  “Why? What’s it to you whether I believe it or don’t?”

  Cletus shrugged his shoulders.

  “Ain’t nothing to me. I just figured you to have more imagination than that, you being a writer and all.”

  “I’m not any writer.”

  “Oh, the heck you’re not,” Cletus answered with a look of total impatience.

  “Cletus, don’t preach at me.” I was beginning to think I might yell or cry and I didn’t want to do either. What I wanted was for him to stop pushing at me.

  He looked off toward the woods.

  “That’s probably what she gave him,” he said matter-of-factly.

  I straightened up.

  “What? What did she give him?”

  Cletus squatted down to pick at a dry broccoli leaf.

  “Well, you know Ob won’t just make a whirligig from something we can understand. He don’t carve out little doggies and kitties. Because he don’t care about things concrete. Ob’s not making yard decorations. He’s making art. I can understand why he never put the ’gigs out in the yard. He never meant to entertain the neighbors.

  “I just figure May gave him permission to have some imagination.”

  Cletus looked up at my face.

  “Ob’s got visions, Summer. Just like you, except you’re always fighting yours off.”

  And when Cletus said that, I felt like I couldn’t ever win anymore, I couldn’t ever come out on top of anything in this life. I couldn’t even remember what it was about Cletus I used to hate so much. I couldn’t even stay ahead of him.

  I turned and walked away. I felt lost. I might as well have been spinning in a round metal tub, in a twenty-foot wall of water, washing down off that mountain. Just lost forever in Deep Water.

  I did not stay lost for long.

  Guidance came to me in the form of a greasy-haired lunatic, and now, desperate, I am passing him the torch, hoping he can lead us out of this infernal darkness, this place none of us can anymore call home.

  The day after May failed to make her appearance, the day after Ob trudged miserably one way while I trudged miserably the other, was what they call in English class the dénouement. All our stories took a sharp turn because of what happened that next day, we were put on a different road, and like Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion, we are all hoping that there really is a wizard of Oz. And that in that Emerald City we will find what it is Ob needs to finally rest his soul.

  The day after May didn’t come to us, Ob didn’t get out of bed. He didn’t get me up either, and from a bad dream I woke with a start, knowing things were wrong, knowing I had missed something vitally important.

  Among these, of course, was the school bus. It was Monday, and Ob should have called me out of bed at five-thirty, but he didn’t, and when I finally woke at seven o’clock, it was too late to set the day straight. But maybe God intended for me to sleep in that morning, needed me to stay home, as He counted on all of the day’s events spreading out just like He’d planned them.

  I jumped from bed and hurried down the hall to Ob’s room at the other end of the trailer.

  I knocked on his door.

  “Ob?”

  No answer came to me.

  “Ob? You awake?”

  My breathing was tight, just like my nerves, as I wondered what I’d find inside that room. I had been dreading Ob’s death for so long that in my mind I practically had the coffin picked out and which tie he’d wear. I thought this morning might be the one for truly final decisions.

  “Summer?” I heard him say in a weak voice.

  My heart lifted a little at the sound of his voice, and I opened the door a crack. There still wasn’t much light outside, so all I could see of him was his thin, bony silhouette upright in the bed. I could feel the fear in him.

  “Ob, you okay?” I went over and reached out to touch his arm. “Are you sick, Ob?”

  His hand came up and covered mine. He was shaking his head, patting my fingers again and again. I wasn’t sure what to do.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed. His face was gray in the light, and he looked to me like some poor victim of a medical experiment.

  “What is it, Ob?” I asked.

  And in that gray cast, that fog in which we both sat, I could see, and feel, that tears were rolling down his face.

  “I must’ve overslept,” he whispered.

  And he knew, as well as I, that he had never, not any day of his life, overslept. He was as trustworthy as the sun in this.

  I took my hand from underneath his and stroked his shoulder.

  “It’s all right, Ob,” I told him. “Happens to everybody,” I said, knowing full well it didn’t.

  “You go on back to sleep if you want, Ob. I’ll put some coffee on the stove. And I’ll fix you some eggs and cocoa when you get up.”

  Ob didn’t protest. He was humiliated, I knew, and wanted to be left alone.

  I understood that feeling. Once when I was in fourth grade, our teacher had made us write descriptions of each other. She said she would read them aloud and we would try to guess who was being described.

  One of the descriptions she read was of a girl who sounded to me like some sad welfare case, in the sorry way her clothes and hair were described. But everyone in the class seemed to know right away who it was. Only the girl herself was stumped.

  That was about the only time in my life I didn’t put two and two together. And once I realized the writer had in fact been describing me — or what she saw when she looked at me — all I wanted was to be home, safe with May and Ob, never to leave the haven of my own room again.

  But I had to sit among others for the rest of the school day. Exposed.

  I understood Ob’s need to be alone.

  I went out to the kitchen and called the junior high to let them know I wouldn’t be coming anytime that day, and I got a pot of coffee brewing. I thought about old Number 56, knew i
t would have sat idling a few extra minutes this morning, waiting to see if I was going to come hauling it over the hill with my coat half on and my books sliding every which way. It was a nice feeling, the knowing that I was always expected.

  I sat down with my coffee and wished I had a medical book in the house, something that might give me some clues on how to help Ob. But all we had was Aunt May’s worn-out copy of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, which she had reached for every time I threw up as a child. I didn’t figure on Dr. Spock giving me any good advice about old men who couldn’t go on without their wives.

  I watched the Today show a while. I even had this crazy hope that maybe I’d be lucky and Dr. Art Ulene would talk about that very thing, about grieving old men who were starting to oversleep in the mornings. But the subject was acne — which I was sorry Cletus wasn’t around to hear — and I was left with nothing to go on except my own common sense.

  And my own common sense was sending me a pretty strong message, one that at first I didn’t want to listen to because it scared me so. But by 9:00 A.M. I had pretty much come to the conclusion that Ob had overslept not because he had made a mistake but because deep down he was finished. Finished waiting for May and finished waiting for all his grief to dry up and leave him. And maybe, in a way, finished with me.

  Presently Ob did come shuffling out of his room. He was in his pajamas, hadn’t even bothered to get dressed, and this sent four-alarm chills running through my whole body. He looked ready for the nursing home or the grave. My heart was breaking in half, and at the same time I was so mad at him I wanted to kill him. What was it going to take to shake some life back in him?

  Ob drank his cocoa and looked out the front window while I got the table spread. It was nearly ten o’clock, and I was starving. I was used to having breakfast at five forty-five. May had always made a big hot breakfast for me. Since she died, Ob had given me cereal and toast. Today, I was cooking for myself.

  Once we got settled down and began to eat, though, things relaxed a little between us and we began to talk.

  I searched for topics that had generally interested both of us before, like whether or not we should get a dog and did we think that young guy at the hardware was drunk or just had a speech problem and maybe this spring we ought to buy one of those Weed Eaters so we could clean out that mess around the old Chevy.

  But right in the middle of my little speech on the virtues of Weed Eaters, Ob pushed away his half-eaten breakfast and gave me a long sad look.

  I shut up.

  “Summer,” he said, “I don’t know that I can do it.”

  “Do what, Ob?”

  He shook his head. Those tears were coming back to him.

  “I never was no hand at housekeeping. Maybe there was a time I could’ve learned. But it’s too late for me now, and I don’t know that I can do all that needs to be done to keep this place running.”

  I knew he meant me — he meant keep me running. The trailer could take care of itself. He wasn’t so sure I could.

  “I can take care of myself, Ob.”

  He swallowed hard and waited a minute to collect his voice.

  “May wouldn’t have wanted you caring for yourself, child. We brought you to this place to raise you up with our own hands, and she wouldn’t want you having to look to your own needs. She’d want you to have somebody right here seeing after you.

  “I don’t know that this old man is going to be of any use to you, Summer. I’m not doing so good since she passed on.”

  In a strange and unexpected way Ob’s saying this exhilarated me. I’m not sure what it was, but it had something to do with him still being rooted enough to things to know when they were going wrong. If Ob had overslept and sat around in his pajamas all day and made excuses for it — or worse, thought nothing of it at all — that would have made me ready to give up on him.

  But he knew he wasn’t doing so good and he still knew enough to be ashamed.

  That gave me some hope.

  “Ob.” I reached for his hand. “Maybe you could start a new batch of ’gigs. Maybe you need to get busy on something a while till some more time passes. I can take care of things. I can run this place till you’re better.”

  He gave me a weary smile.

  “There’s nothing in this old head of mine to make a ’gig from, sweetheart. Seems all it’s filled up with is talking to May and thinking about her dying on us. I keep running through that garden over and over, finding the poor thing and feeling my heart freeze up just like it did that day. It’s over and done with except in my head, but I just can’t get it out of there. I got no ’gigs in me anymore. The only vision I’ve got is of my poor old May, and seems there’s nobody nor nothing can distract me from that. And I ain’t even so sure I want to be distracted. I got to keep her with me somehow.”

  I nodded my head and stroked his arm. What could I say to him? He was telling the pure truth, I knew, and I didn’t have any answers for either of us. All I could do was fix him another cup of cocoa and pour me another cup of coffee and just sit.

  Then at three twenty-five Cletus Underwood and his suitcase showed up at the front door, and we finally got some directions to Oz.

  “I t’s called a what kind of church?” Ob said as he looked over Cletus’s shoulder at the newspaper clipping that had been pulled from the famous suitcase.

  “Spiritualist,” Cletus said. “The Spiritualist Church of Glen Meadows, it says right here. Over in Putnam County.”

  The two of them sat down on the couch while I took the La-Z-Boy, wondering to myself whether Cletus wasn’t just some alien pretending to be a human life. Surely he knew he’d never get Ob and me inside of a church, even if it served a thousand different kinds of doughnuts.

  Ob took the clipping from Cletus’s hand while Cletus went on talking.

  “The pastor there, it says, can communicate with the dead. Says that’s what the whole church is about. Making connections between this world and the other side. This isn’t any ordinary church.

  “I clipped this out of the paper last year because I loved that picture of her. ‘The Reverend Miriam B. Young: Small Medium at Large.’ Don’t you just love that? I’d dearly love to write newspaper titles when I’m grown. Anyway, some call her the Bat Lady because she keeps bats as pets. Others call her the White Lady because she only wears white.”

  Cletus beamed at Ob.

  “But I’m calling her the Just-in-Time Lady because that’s what she is. She’s showed up here in my suitcase just in time to lead us to May.”

  Ob didn’t smile back. I knew he was thinking, thinking of a kind way to let Cletus know that this new idea ranked right up there with the one that gave us Cheez Whiz, and that instead of heading to Putnam County Cletus had better get himself checked into the Pineville Sanatorium.

  “How long a drive you figure it is over to that part of Putnam County?” Ob finally said.

  “Ob!” I shouted. “Are you crazy? We can’t go to Putnam County looking for Bat Woman!”

  Ob and Cletus just stared at me.

  “How come we can’t?” Ob asked. “You got something better to do for school break?”

  “School break? We’re going to spend school break in Putnam County? In some Spiritual church?”

  “Spiritualist,” Cletus corrected.

  “Hell, why not,” Ob said, looking at Cletus with a grin. “We just might learn us a thing or two.”

  I saw that grin on his face, that glint in his eyes, and I knew that Ob had suddenly found himself a reason to get out of bed on time in the mornings, at least for a little while longer. The three of us might look like complete pure fools tracking down this preacher lady and her bats. But if it kept Ob grinning and chasing after some hope, I knew I’d have to be willing to follow him.

  “Three hours,” Cletus said.

  “Say what?” Ob said.

  “I figure on three hours to get there,” Cletus continued. “I already looked at the map. It’s an easy drive. We can
take the turnpike almost all the way in. Maybe we can even stop in Charleston and look at the capitol on our way back. I’ve not ever been to the capitol. Never been anywhere, really, except the middle part of Raleigh County and the middle part of Fayette County. Hard to be a Renaissance Man when you can’t get your nose any further than that.”

  “A what kind of a man?” asked Ob.

  “Renaissance. Learned it in history. Back in Europe there were these men who were real well-rounded. You know, they could paint, play music, write poems. They could talk science and philosophy. Knew a lot about a lot. Folks called them Renaissance Men.”

  Cletus got this cocky little look on his face.

  “I’m training to be one of them,” he said with a big grin. “Deep Water needs itself some Renaissance Men.”

  “Ha!” Ob laughed and slapped Cletus on the knee. “After our little trip, you might be calling yourself a Rent-a-Séance Man!”

  Both of them burst out laughing while I just sighed and went to the refrigerator to pull out some Cokes. I could tell Cletus was going to be with us a while.

  He hung on till suppertime. Then when it became apparent Ob and I were probably going to rely on peanut butter to pull us through, he finally got the notion to go on home.

  Cletus never once asked why I wasn’t at school that day. Never once commented on Ob being in his pajamas.